The Man Who Heard Too Much

by Bill Granger

  The possibilities were narrow. The mistake involved either theft or carelessness. The results were the same. There had been ten secret tapes of the secret meetings, five for each side. Each tape consisted of the actual words of the participants, as well as the simultaneous translations of the interpreters for each side.

  Now there were nine tapes. The missing tape was one of two that contained the secret agreement. It was typical of the Americans and Russians to distrust each other so much that even their secret accords had to have a trail of evidence.

  By design—or again, by carelessness, it didn’t matter which—one of the Russians’ tapes had “disappeared” from the safe room and “floated” (in the agency slang) into the possession of an unauthorized person.

  The “floater” was identified as Rolf Gustafson. That was at 4:31 P.M. He seemed to want to cooperate freely with the security forces. He explained how he had made a little extra money packing all the equipment of the translators at the conference, as well as the state television’s technical crew.

  Were there tape recordings?

  Of course.

  Who got tape recordings?

  The list was short. One of the names was Rena Taurus. Another name was Michael Hampton. There were no more than six other names.

  The man across the aisle in the crowded jet had gray eyes framed by a pale face. There was a touch of winter in his look.

  Rena opened her eyes and saw him looking at her. It wasn’t so unusual. Men looked at her all the time; let them look. She gazed at him openly, as though he were naked and she wore too many clothes, too much silk, as though pleasure were stretched like satin across her belly. Everything in the universe of her gaze was created for her pleasure. Naked man, said the azure eyes. A smile of pleasure formed on her lips. It was the pleasure derived from seeing interesting or beautiful things, especially when least expected. Men interested her. She studied them the way some men study women. She was fascinated by his look and glanced at him again. He was nothing like Michael, who was generous and young and very, touchingly innocent. He was not those things. There were secrets in his eyes. Her smile faded; she was puzzled by those November eyes.

  He stared at her when she glanced at him, but did not speak.

  The plane broke free of the clouds only in time to begin a long descent to Brussels. The North Sea, always gray and angry, chopped in vicious waves below the wings.

  She thought of going home alone to the place where she lived near the park. The apartment was small and precise. Her father, who was still alive, had visited her there once and exclaimed that whole families in Lithuania did not have so much room to live in. She knew his stories were true. She once had gone to Lithuania to find the broken thread of family memories. She had searched for names her father gave her. She found some, and was sorry she had gone back to that place her parents fled. The conditions in Vilnius had made her angry, and she had not expected anger.

  The jet bumped again through the lower elevations of clouds. The attendants had picked up the empty miniature bottles and plastic glasses and paper cups and plates and were bracing themselves at the front of the plane. The No Smoking light was on.

  Rena glanced again at the pale man.

  In such moments of rough landings, everyone on a plane deals with fear of death. Rena believed this, but she had long since resolved that particular fear. This is what she told herself. The plane shuddered at some invisible restraint. Landing gear whirred down and locked with loud bumps. The plane tipped, rolled to the right. The farmlands of Belgium were divided below, and there were streams of traffic on the roads.

  The man across the aisle only stared at her.

  She thought she would take a warm shower when she was safe at home on the rue du Lavois, on the hill above the center of the town. After the shower, she might drink some of the Stolichnaya vodka she kept in her refrigerator, in the freezer section. Bread and Brie and an evening to listen to music, perhaps Grieg in honor of the week she had spent in Scandinavia. She smiled at that, a dazzling smile and very out of place on a plane careening down through the clouds with one hundred twenty-one passengers strapped to fragile plastic chairs. But Rena was in her cocoon again: She would fall asleep and dream of Michael or the tape, and not think of Vilnius or anger or the wolf in winter. She would dream only of her pleasure.

  The tires bumped and the brakes shuddered. Flaps went up, biting at the wind to slow the hurtling steel. The air slammed against the wings, and the engines whined in their familiar complaining voices. In that violent moment, they were down. Relief shrugged out of the crowd on the plane. Even as it taxied to the terminal, the plane was filled with sounds of voices again, the clicking off of seat belts, the slam of overhead baggage doors. Everything routine; piece of cake; we weren’t really afraid.

  The gray man did not move.

  The aisles clogged before the plane made contact with the terminal. The jetway snaked out from the terminal and clamped to the bulkhead.

  People pushed against each other in the narrow aisle to be first out of the plane. Rena thought it was like the ungentle queues in the fruit markets or in lines at the cinemas. She had spent four years in England once, where people waited in patient lines. She could never again become used to the aggressiveness in lines on the Continent.

  Rena waited, and so did the man across the aisle.

  The plane was nearly empty when she got up. She stretched and took down her weekend bag from the overhead compartment. Was he watching her? Of course, he had waited to watch her stretch and take down this bag. She was totally honest about her appearance and the effect it created. She made her way up the aisle. Near the front of the plane, she turned back.

  The man across the aisle was still in his seat. He was still watching. His look was curious, even familiar. How could he presume that intimacy? But it wasn’t that, Rena saw. It was a familiar look but a sad one as well, as though he was staring at a sick child or a grieving mother. And there was something else in him. Yes, she thought, exactly like the wolf. But where had she ever seen a wolf in winter? In that moment, she felt the satin stirrings inside her belly, felt a warmth that was not intended. She pouted at him in that moment, and her wet lips opened, and she looked tentative and uncertain and confused. And then she looked away.

  “Sorry for the delay. Fly Sabena next time,” the attendant was saying. Rena turned, nodded, stepped onto the jetway and followed the windowless corridor to the terminal. Was it raining in Brussels? She would have to get a taxi all the way to her apartment below the Palace of Justice. Brussels would be full of Saturday-night revelers.

  It never occurred to her the man was following her.

  She climbed the carpeted stairs to her apartment on the third floor. The stairs were narrow and the banister was elegant, sculpted in the French style of the last century. She had tall French doors for windows in her flat, and there was a small gas fireplace in the main room which bore a ridiculously ornate marble mantel. She stepped into her rooms and turned on the light in the small kitchen. The telephone was on the kitchen counter as well as the recording machine. No one had called her in a week away. It disappointed her for a moment; maybe the tape machine was broken. She would have to ask M. Claude on the fifth floor, who was a genius at that sort of thing.

  A moment after she closed the door of her apartment, the doorbell rang.

  She had just taken off her coat and hung it in the armoire in her bedroom. She made a face. The doorbell rang again. Claude on the fifth floor probably had seen her come in and he wanted to… well, he wanted to see if she needed anything. Claude was sweet, a gentle, divorced man who was a bureaucrat in EC in charge of counting such things as wheat crops in France and pea crops in Britain—but she really wasn’t ready to go to bed with him.

  She opened the door to the hall, and he pushed her inside. Her breath caught. It was him, the man on the plane. The wolf was very near, there was blood on his teeth.

  “Qui êtes-vous?” she demanded.

 
“Sit down,” he said. His voice was low and flat but without any softness. No blood, but the savage feeling was in the room now. Whatever was her in the room was beaten back to shadows in that moment. “I want to see if you took something by mistake.”

  “Who are you?”

  He stared at her a moment. “Don’t be afraid.” He tried to make the words gentle, and they sounded grotesque. “There’s been a problem, in Malmö. From the conference. Something is missing and it’s a mistake, but we still need to have it back. I’m from the conference, and it’s a little matter of security. I want to see if you have it.”

  “How did you follow me?”

  “That was difficult, even with a police driver. Brussels taxi drivers have their own rules.” Devereaux smiled again, but it did not assure her. It is one thing to have a man stare at you, to admire you, even to follow you for a while down a sidewalk because you are what you are. It is another thing for a man to be on this side of the door.…

  “I want to see identification—”

  He showed her a card. It might be identification. She would remember the U.S. Great Seal on the plastic card. He seemed slow and intent on not threatening her. She was not assured. She thought of Michael suddenly and the sixth tape.

  Her bags were in the middle of the living room. He picked up the weekend case and opened it.

  “This is monstrous, I’ll call the police—”

  He glanced at her then. The glance was almost an afterthought, as though he had decided something she would not understand.

  He took out her blouses and put them gently on the couch. He took her nightgown and put it on the blouses. She had worn the nightgown when she slept with Michael in the big room at the Savoy. Her perfume was on the gown. He really was looking for something, she thought. He moved his fingers like chess pieces. They probed her case and clothing. Whatever it was, it was small, the thing he was looking for.

  She saw Michael in her mind’s eye. He was checking his luggage in the room at the Savoy, and he held a tape in his hand.

  She saw Michael and felt chilled. Would he be in danger? But there was to be no danger, least of all to Michael.

  What did he say? It was the wrong tape? He would have to return it? But she had reminded him he had to catch his train.

  This could be handled with civility, then. She could tell this man about Michael and they would get their tape back and the matter would be over. She had no intention of letting Michael be in harm’s way, none at all.

  Rena said nothing. She folded her arms across her chest in a defensive way. She took a step back. She was very alert to the stranger filling the middle of her room. If he didn’t find what he wanted, what would come next?

  He was going through her equipment bag now. He opened her translation books. He looked at the tapes as though looking for a marking on them. Each cassette was turned over twice. He put them down on the couch.

  She stood near the door with her arms folded, waiting. Her intense blue eyes, full of fury a moment before, were calm now. She willed the calm center that filled her, stilled every thought but this single feeling of immense calm.

  He looked up at last.

  “You slept with Michael Hampton. Did he mention a piece of equipment? A tape cassette that didn’t belong to him? The equipment manager, Rolf Gustafson. He packed Michael’s bag. Did he check it before he left you? You slept together. He must have packed his bags to leave you.”

  The words were careless, brutal, as though a man has the right to accuse her of making love to someone and then demand that she tell any secrets exchanged with her lover. He didn’t care now if he frightened her.

  “I don’t know what you mean. You insinuate—”

  “You shared room 343 in the Savoy Hotel in Malmö, but he was registered in a room at the Medallion Hotel. He left the hotel to catch the 1340 train for Stockholm. Did he mention anything when the equipment manager brought his bags?”

  She stared. The lazy American voice was less soft now because he spoke like a policeman. All policemen speak the same, no matter what their language. It is the dialect of power.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Devereaux sighed. He was on one knee on the floor in the living room, holding the equipment bag. She pressed her arms across her chest very tight to hold in her fear of him. She would not be afraid. He got up and crossed the room toward her.

  He was very close and stared into her face as though studying it. She felt like a child in school again, confronted by a particularly vile teacher who wished her nothing good.

  “Why do you want to lie to me?”

  “What? Are you accusing me of being a liar? You are an insulting bastard. But you must be used to that. Being an American, you don’t know how crude your manners are or your questions.”

  Devereaux reached into his pocket and took out a card. On the blank card was written a telephone number in ink. “You can call—night or day, it doesn’t matter. Someone will be there.”

  “Why would I call?”

  “You might have a reason. Sometime. We want our property back.”

  “I’m not a thief.”

  “Is Michael?”

  “You are insulting.”

  The gray eyes let the pity seep out. “That’s the least of it,” Devereaux said.

  7

  COPENHAGEN

  Coffee. Drank more damned coffee in the last week than in the last two years. Or at least what passed for coffee on the inside and which was nothing but bat piss anyway.

  Coffee warmed him. Coffee kept him alert. Had to stay awake and stay one step ahead. Sitting in the open window of this café on the Stroget, watching faces pass, watching rain. Rain was careless, almost soft. The sheen on the pavement of the pedestrian street off Radhus Pladsen was like the sheen of makeup on a pretty face. No traffic here, just footsteps, voices, laughter.

  First thing Henry McGee did after Chicago was get $50,000 out of the Bank of Hong Kong. Don Anthony had kept his word, had taken the $450,000 and left the rest. Seed money. Henry McGee thought he had to seed very, very carefully in the next few days to see where Skarda stood and where Henry stood. There had been no reason for Devereaux to suddenly bring up Skarda in that interrogation room in Chicago, no reason at all. The bastard was connecting Henry to something that nobody in the world was supposed to know about. Except him and Skarda and a dozen people on the committee inside KGB.

  He had gone to the Honest Broker in Frankfurt after stealing all the necessary documentation to get an international flight. Frankfurt via New York, London, and Edinburgh, necessary detours. He felt he didn’t have time to go through the rigmarole of checking out cemeteries for likely birthdates and then applying for birth certificates that could be turned into social security cards and driver’s licenses and, finally, passports. That was the classic way to get good paper. The other way was fairly classic, too. You waited out at Kennedy for a nice planeload of tourists to come in from London or thereabouts, and you got one of the right age and size and all that, and you became his friend. Like the English director who hung out in the Algonquin Hotel bar, where all the stage people hang out. Son of a bitch hadn’t heard about the AIDS crisis. Was still looking for young pretty boys.

  Henry McGee had learned all that fag talk inside. Knew just enough of it anyway and said he knew where there were young and beautiful men who would do things for you. Upshot was they got drunk together and told stories and went down to SoHo and Henry put six inches of West German steel between those thin, elegant shoulder blades, staining a Savile Row gray pearl sports coat on the way and utterly ruining a handmade Maida Vale button-down mauve shirt. This happened in the entry of a townhouse. Eric Harp. Well, play on Eric Harp and John Mozart.

  He was on the morning British Airways flight out of JFK. He traveled first class and even enjoyed the service, especially Brenda the blond stewardess, who was very attentive. He liked the way her legs joined up to her body beneath the skirt. She had a nice accent to go with the leg
s and a bright smile that was as open as a door. He would know just what to do with a girl like Brenda over three or four days, maybe more. He was an old friend by the time they landed in London, and he almost decided to spend the night with Brenda and see how the door opened and see how her legs exactly did join her body—but that could wait. It was raining at Heathrow. He took a British Caledonian flight north to Edinburgh. It was time for the first message.

  There was no point in evasion or even politeness. The Soviet consulate in Edinburgh wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails out of the message, but he knew there were people there who would know the people to contact. He made the message plain to let them know he was out and running and that this was about Skarda.

  He dialed a number from the telephone box at the central station off Princes Street in the heart of the old Scottish city. The spires of Edinburgh Castle loomed on the hill above the railway culvert. Henry let the phone ring three times and then hung up. He dialed again. This time, they picked it up on first ring.

  “Coordinate 31 Moonwalker,” Henry McGee said in perfect Russian. “Skarda plus six. Henry McGee flies.”

  He replaced the receiver. They got the message all right. Everything was taped. He went back to his room at the Station Hotel and took a long shower. In the morning, he went out in search of a likely-looking American. Eric Harp was getting old, and he shouldn’t overstay his welcome.

  He found the American at noon coming out of the tour of Holyrood Palace. They became old friends within minutes and drank at one of the pubs off Princes Street. Great friends, in fact. Henry regretted another murder, especially of such a jovial companion, but Americans were always checking their fucking wallets to make sure they hadn’t lost their passports, and there was an American consulate just up the street. If the missing passport number got passed on too quickly to the computers, then Henry would be up a creek again. He needed a place to hide for a while, to await contact from KGB. Did they want him home? They damned well better want him home.